Getting Started with WildFly - Java EE 7 Development with WildFly - page 4

WildFly and Enterprise Application Platform
WildFly and previous JBoss Application Servers were freely available for the community
in the form of downloadable binary packages (for major releases) or buildable source code
(for bug fixing releases). These versions are called community releases and are free to use
for development and production.
JBoss also releases more stable and hardened versions of software of the community
builds, which are called Enterprise Application Platform ( EAP ), a commercial product
with support service from Red Hat. Red Hat calls this kind of relationship between projects
as upstream/downstream. The community builds are the source of changes and innovations
for the downstream, the code is downstream. The commercial version numeration differed
from the community line, but it was an extended variant of the community releases (for ex-
ample, EAP 6.1.0 was built on JBoss 7.2.0, which was available only on GitHub in the
form of buildable source code; the same goes for EAP 6.2.0 and JBoss 7.3.0). EAP builds
have a more complex licensing system; the usage terms depend on the maturity of the build
and are as follows:
• EAP Alpha is free for the developers and production use, as they are an equivalent
of the standard community version with optional fixes included. The correspond-
ing community binaries may not be available for download, as they would be sim-
ilar to the EAP Alpha version.
• EAP Beta is available to developers for free (after registration to a subscription
program), but cannot be used in production.
• EAP Final is also available to developers for free, but additionally, new security
patches are available only in the paid subscription.
The distribution model proposed by JBoss allows the developers to work for free on the
same version as the one used in production. This is a huge benefit, especially since the
competitive solution from Oracle (Glassfish: the reference implementation of a Java EE
compliant server) no longer has a version with commercial support.